Building an Engaging Facebook Community

Facebook is one of the best places to build a community and help promote your brand and your website or blog. To be honest for a while I was very lazy when it came to Facebook marketing for ThinkComputers. Our “Likes” remained the same and there was not much engagement at all. This is never good if the end goal is to bring people from Facebook to the website. Over the past month I have really took the time to see what works on Facebook and how to get users engaged.

So many people think having the most followers or likes is best, but is it really? Say you have 5,000 likes on Facebook, but only 100 of those fans are engaged. That means if you post something at most 100 of those fans will even see your post yet even click on the link back to your website. On the other hand if I have 500 fans on Facebook and they all are engaged I have a better chance of people seeing my post and clicking the link back to my website. This is true for pretty much all social networks.

One thing that is great about Facebook is that they show publically how many engaged users you have. They call it “talking about this” and list is right by the number of likes your page has. Some pretty well known websites have horrible likes to “talking about this ratios”. Something like 16,000 likes but only 100 people talking about the site.

These people are not marketing their Facebook pages correctly and could be potentially losing sales, traffic to their website and much more. I would say a 5% ratio of Likes to “Talking about this” is good, but anything over 10% and you are doing a good job! Where does ThinkComputers sit?

That puts us at 36%, which is very good! So how do we get there? And how can you surge engagement like you see in the graph at the top of the page? There is no sure fire way that will work, but here is what I have done to get ThinkComputers where it is.

Constant Content
If you are going to want users to engage on your Facebook page you are going to want to post content. If you are a content site like ThinkComputers this is easy, but for other types of sites this may be hard. I would say at the very least post 1 post a day. Constant content will keep people coming back to your Facebook page and will also make it more likely that your posts will show up in the news feed.

Ask Questions
We use Facebook to try and bring people to our website, but you cannot make every post about that. Every once in awhile ask a question to your users. You would be surprised at the response. People are much more likely to comment when you ask a question and after they make that first comment they are more likely to keep on commenting on other posts. Questions are also a great way to gauge what your community is most interested in.

Post with Images
This is a big one, every post you make should contain an image. So many people are lazy and just let WordPress auto-post to Facebook, but that just puts a link on there with a small thumbnail. If you use a larger image the post will get more traction and people will be more likely to share the photo as well. Also the larger image takes up more real estate on a user’s news feed so it will get more attention. Don’t be lazy, schedule your posts through Facebook using a large image for each post.

Contests
Contests are a great way to get new likes and spread the word about your page. Give something away and require users to Like your page and share a contest photo (example). This way you are getting new likes plus that person is spreading the word about your page which will lead to new likes and even more shares of your photo. Also if you team up with a company to give away one of their products make sure you ask them to post about it on their Facebook page as well.

Check Stats
The best thing about Facebook pages is that you can track everything. The Page Insights show you likes, people talking about your page, friends of fans, weekly total reach and much more. You can even see the reach of each of your individual posts. Use this information to refine things and see what works best.

So that is how I’ve really started to build the ThinkComputers Facebook community. If you have any questions or want to share your tips leave them in the comments below.